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What should quality mean in
social economy organisations?1
Américo M. S. Carvalho Mendes
ATES – Transversal Area of Social Economy
Catholic University of Portugal – Porto
This is another blog-post in our thread about lessons learnt from the work with social
welfare and other social economy organisations in Portugal.
These organisations are under an increasing pressure to improve “quality”. This
pressure is due to two reasons, at least. One has to do with the fact that some are facing
increasing competition from other providers of similar services. The other is that the
State, private donors and the society at large are become more vigilant and demanding
about the quality of the services delivered by these organisations.
Going now to what does it mean to improve quality in these organisations, one meaning
is to improve the professional qualifications of their managers and workers. So, we have
been witnessing a substantial increase in the number of managers and workers with
college degrees and in the number of training hours provided to the personnel in these
organisations.
To improve quality also means to improve the quality of the services delivered to the
users. Improved professional qualification of the managers and workers is rightly seen
as a condition to improve the quality of the services. Another front of this trajectory to
improve quality related to the other two already mentioned here is the implementation
of quality management systems. The second edition of the FAS Project presented in one
of our previous blog-posts was focused in this kind of systems. If this implementation is
done based on participatory methods, with a clear focus on improving performance and
without blowing out of proportion the instrument (the information system needed for
this kind of system), the top management and the workers see clear benefits in adopting
the system and go along with it. In some cases, the organisations make one step further
and go for the certification under the ISO norms or under national norms that exist for
social welfare services.
Often the talk and actions taken to improve quality in these organisations are limited to
what we have mentioned up to now. There is, however, another front for quality
management and improvement which is very important for this kind of organisations.
We are talking about organisations whose mission is to contribute to more solidarity in
the relations among human beings and between human being and their environment.
Also, as we mentioned in our last blog-post, these organisations are under frequent risk
of asymmetric information problems in the relationships among their stakeholders. In
that previous blog-post we talked about the positive role of participation to cope with
these problems.
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1 Blog-post published in European Social Innovation Research, on May 1, 2013.
(http://siresearch.eu/blog/what-should-quality-mean-social-economy-organisations)
Now, we want to mention another complementary factor that can contribute to cope
with those problems, in line with the type of mission these organisations have. This
factor corresponds to the human qualities of the managers and workers. To fulfil well
their mission these organisations need at all levels in the organisation people motivated
by the Common Good that the organisation is supposed to serve. If the organisation is
captured by opportunistic interests of some managers or some workers some time along
the way this will be detrimental to the performance of the organisation and may even be
a cause of its death.